I've bought a camera (a nice Minolta Dimage A2) recently and ever since then I've been on a quest for a perfect software for managing the hundreds of photos I now take every week. Photoshop Album is really the closest to perfection I could find so far, but it also is slow. I mean really slow. It also cannot be bought here in Poland. I liked Picasa for its cool interface, though as you can expect it's not available here as well. I've tried the tryout and really enjoyed the interface. It has its drawbacks but its reasonably fast and incredibly enjoyable to use.

Now hearing Google's buyout of the company/product I've actually been expecting that something like that may happen. So when i went to their site today I was nicely surprised with the fact.

PICASA IS NOW FREE!
THANK YOU GOOGLE!

Now not to sound ungratefull it only has 3 disadvantages when compared to Adobe Photoshop Album (PSA):
- no tags - sure you can assign keywords but you still need to type them for every new photo album you'll add and you better spell them right or you will not be able to find your pictures conveniently. I really like the idea of the tags (and the implementation in PSA) better.
- inability to define your custom editor (you have to use your system's defautl editor - which I'm not fond of setting Photoshop Element (PSE) as) - now PSA does not have that as well, but it has Photoshop Elements as its default editor which i happen to use and like the most. Reasonably cheap but powerfull enough for my needs.
- blurring - the full screen slideshow is really nice I like the transitions and the ability to show the bottom navigation bar, BUT Picasa seems to take a lower resolution version of my picture (i bet for the sake of speed) and stretch it then. Great, but now I'm never able to tell whether the picture is blurry because me or the camera did something wrond ort is it Picasa doing its stretching. The blurig is not problematic for the viewing, it's problematic for when Ii need to decide whether I'm going to throw away a picture (i take a lot of them redundantly to choose between them later) or is it going to stay.
While I also think the quick fixes on PSA give better effects I can really do them in PSE - but the 3 drawbacks mentioned a bove are really major - now while i think I'll install Picasa on my father's system (since he bought a camera recently as well) as the program is really a snap to learn even if you can't speak English (and there is like 0 good photo management software in Polish), I'm not ready to jump ships from APA SE I'm using now.

Though since Picasa offers nice "folder monitoring" feature and it can simply monitor the PSA folder I'll just use it as a quick browser for the PSA albums.

Give it a whirl, it's really worth it!